Magic vs. Brainrot

I re-read Lisey's Story again recently. The story follows Lisey Landon, the widow of internationally famous writer Scott Landon. It goes into some trippy places, chiefly Boo'ya Moon, a kind of alternate universe certain people can visit, a place with exotic wildflowers, a healing pool, and permanently purple skies.

I found it harder to get through Lisey's Story this time around. But this might be because of my brain rot.

Here's something I believe: modern life is killing us.

The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Angry at tech companies for designing apps designed to draw us away from our real lives, and angry at myself for giving into it. Angry at myself for all the times I've looked at my phone when I should have been looking at my actual life in front of me. Angry because all the hope and promise of technology I felt as a kid has been warped and twisted into this.

I think about all the little acts of neglect I've shown my mind and my body. Just constantly screwing with my dopamine receptors. Like a porn addict turning to more and more extremes just to feel anything. Deadening all my nerve endings. Desperately seeking out content that I can feed into my brain to make myself feel better. Is this life? Is this what life is meant to be like?

I don't want to fund warmongering billionaires anymore. I don't want to lose my critical thinking and executive functioning skills, either. I think this when I get AI shoved in my face by every app I use: don't you want to do this with AI instead? Don't you want me to make your appointments? Prioritise your task lists? Write your CV, your cover letters, difficult messages to your loved ones? And I think, no, because I want to use my fucking brain. I appreciate this is my most snobby, Luddite-ish opinion about AI. But I do think it's true. At this very critical juncture, when we really need to keep our wits about us, when we have to question and second-guess every bit of information we come across in case it's fake, we are ceasing to use our minds properly. What a mess. What an unmitigated disaster.

Do you remember the part of the lockdowns in the UK when you weren't allowed to drive anywhere unless it was absolutely necessary? And then they said you could drive to go for a walk. So we drove to the woods. We all ran in and I took this big, deep breath. I had never been so happy to be outside. It felt like I could breathe properly again. I even took a photo to document it.

That's how I felt when I took my tech break at the start of this year. It felt like taking deep, soothing breaths among the trees. I need a better balance. I do want to be informed. I don't want to turn a blind eye to what's happening in the world. But I need to manage my doom intake in a way that doesn't make me want to cry all the time.

This is my focus at the moment. Working out a way to be in modern life without allowing it to rot my brain. Using the parts that work for me, and discarding the rest. It's either that, or I uproot the family to go and live on a farm or something.

Some positivity. When I was on my tech break, I was trying to work out what my novel would look like. I'd been given a notepad and a fountain pen for Christmas, so I used that to take initial notes. It just felt so daunting. I had one basic idea, and literally nothing else. How are you meant to come up with a whole book's worth of ideas?

And then I watched this video masterclass by David Lynch. In this, he talks about fishing for ideas:

'I do equate the catching ideas with the thing of fishing. You have to have patience. And I say a desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. And it's like putting a little piece of bait on a hook, and lowering it into the water. And then you don't know when they're going to come or what will trigger them, but lo and behold, on a lucky day, bingo! You'll catch a fish, you'll catch an idea. And like I say, you don't see the fish down there, but when you bring it up out of the water, that's like the idea coming into the conscious mind. You see the fish, you see the details of it, the eyes, the mouth, the fins, all the shiny little scales. You fall in love with this little fish. And you write that idea down. And now you have even more bait, and you can lower that fish in, and other fish will swim to it, that are part of that school, and you'll catch more and more fragments, and a script will start emerging.'

And so I sat down with my notebook in our old rocking chair. I lowered the bait of my original idea down into the water. And I asked questions. What's motivating this character? Who is the antagonist, and what do they want? And to my great surprise, answers came. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Tiny little fish, and I had to write them all down one by one, until my hand was aching and stained with ink. It worked! It actually worked.

Later in that same tech-free period, I had a big plot problem I couldn't resolve. So I got in the shower. And I interviewed myself, out loud. 'What's this character looking for?' and bingo. Answers came out of my mouth, like they were waiting there.

And of course, I have to address the immediate thought that springs into my mind: these ideas might be shit. This whole thing could be terrible. It may never see the light of day. But for a moment it felt like I was tapping into some ancient, primal thing.

Lisey's Story is about love. The complicated and profound love between a husband and a wife, primarily. But it's also about the love of writing. It's also about ideas, and the concept of another world we can reach with our minds. At the end of the book, King writes:

'There really is a pool where we - and in this case by we I mean the vast company of readers and writers - go down to drink and cast our nets. Lisey's Story references literally dozens of novels, poems, and songs in an attempt to illustrate that idea.'

I've said before I don't believe writing is magic. I believe it's mostly about practice. I'm starting to waver on this. I think writing is about practice. It's about sitting down and writing again and again, even when you don't feel like it. But ideas? Maybe? Maybe there's a bit of magic in there. And being moved by other people's work? There's definitely magic in there, too.

Ages ago, I listened to Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic, in which she describes ideas almost as living things, floating around, waiting to be heard and appreciated by humans. I scoffed at most of it, because I wanted to be cynical and cool, but I think some part of me really wanted to believe it even then. Maybe I'm getting soft as I get older. Or maybe I need to believe in this because the rest of the world is scary and sad. I'm starting to think it doesn't really matter. I'm happy to just keep visiting the pool, with my notepad or my laptop, without questioning it too much.

I deconstructed my faith a few years ago, and there were a few books that actually allowed me to do this without judgement. One of them was Rob Bell's What is the Bible? He talks, among many other things, about Jonah and the whale, and whether you need to literally believe it happened to be a Christian. 'That's fine. Lots of people of faith over the years have read this story as a parable about national forgiveness. They point to many aspects of the surreal nature of the story as simply great storytelling.'

But then he goes on to ask why we believe anything that isn't proven in a lab, and whether we want to be closed off to everything we can't explain.

'If we reject all miraculous elements of all stories because we have made up our mind ahead of time that such things simply aren't possible, we run the risk of shrinking the world down to what we can comprehend. And what fun is that?'

And on my most cynical days - whether about faith or spirituality or the idea of a magical realm of ideas humans can access - I think about this quote. It always comes back to me. But what fun is that?

Frankly, whether ideas are magic or human-made, I believe that our heavy dependence on technology is an obstacle. It's severing our connection to each other, and to the other. It's keeping us trapped, dependent, helpless. We have to learn to use technology wisely in a way that benefits us personally, and collectively. We can't allow human connection and creativity to die out, especially not now.

I'll be honest: Lisey's Story isn't perfect. Near the end, I felt that if I had to read the word 'smuck' one more time, I was going to hurl the book against the wall. Or I would have done, had I not been worried about causing damage. And it would have caused damage, because it's huge. It's so large. It is, at points, too long.

But everything else about it, I loved. That's good, isn't it?

When I first read it, I was so into the love story. I was recently in love myself, you see. I missed my boyfriend and I was desperately, dramatically sad, as though I'd just waved him off to war, rather than him being at a university a couple of hours' drive away with fortnightly visits scheduled into the calendar. Already, we had our little in-jokes. Our own language. I sobbed at the ending. I was so raw with emotions back then, all trembling energy. Now, I'm reading it almost 19 years later, and the love part is still beautiful, but I'm noticing other things. I'm noticing the madness and the wonder of the creating, too.

In the last section of the book - in my 2025 reread, that is - I noticed a strange quality of light coming through the blinds. A sunrise. Pink and purple, unusually pretty. I pulled open all the blinds in the conservatory and sat there, living through Lisey's last trip to Boo'ya Moon, bathed in pink and purple light. And for a moment I remembered reading this in my bed, at my parents' house, cross-legged, 19 years before. For a few minutes, I felt more connected to her than I have done in, well, ever. I always say 'I'm a different person now!' because that's how it feels, but of course, I'm not. She lives in me. And I could sense her for a minute. All because of a book. All because someone took an extended trip to the pool. Things might be terrible and I don't know what is to come, but in that moment, I had a book and a beautiful sunrise, and I was glad to be alive.